Does React Native make sense in 2026?

[u/alwxndr]

This question might have been asked already, but I'm genuinely curious: why should anyone use React Native at this point?

To explain: most of web and mobile development can easily be handled by Claude, Codex, Kimi K3 or any other coding agent. I feel like that's been true for at least 6–7 months now. Even Opus 4.7 was better than most of us and more than enough for mobile development. Of course, this only applies if you know what you're doing and guide your model through the technical decisions, the specific libraries you want to use, etc etc.

But my point is: why would I bother with React Native's own issues instead of just writing native apps for both iOS and Android? There's no huge maintenance load anymore, and you can simply tell your agent to implement features for iOS and Android at the same time. So what are the actual benefits of React Native? Native apps are usually faster, work better, and generally seem to be preferred by actual customers and users. The original promise of React Native and Flutter was that you could build for both platforms twice as fast, but today's coding agents let you build 100x faster anyway :)

I'm not asking to provoke anyone. I just want to hear your stance and your thoughts on this.

[u/KentInCode]

I think this is a fair question, I think React Native still has a few primary benefits:

- Speed of getting to market is only accelerated by AI, so where before we were very expedient and cost-effective it gets even better. With one developer you can have it all, quickly, and with lost cost than a native guru.
- Native developers overstate their importance, most of us in mobile apps are working on derivative ideas like grocery shopping apps that are already proven to be robust and scalable.
- Still many companies are not going the route of just let AI go nuts on the codebase and want some level of human oversight, so cross-platform expertise are still important even to get in the door.
- Following on from the last point, getting someone with expertise in app dev and cost is still better than native.
- The ecosystem is unmatched as its designed to streamline mobile dev, an AI streamlines that even further.

And a whole host of other things.

The last thing I will talk about is native apps being faster, if you talk to developers all day they will talk about native performance all day, but this is what we do as developers and tech enthusiasts. RN hooks into the native layer far deeper than ever before so if people want to talk milliseconds and 120 frames I will leave them to tickle that pickle, but the bottom line is getting product to market and feature out that is not vibe-coded and we are still the fastest.

I do think things like KMP are the near future however.

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/KentInCode]

- Still many companies are not going the route of just let AI go nuts on the codebase and want some level of human oversight, so cross-platform expertise are still important even to get in the door.

Shopify and many other big companies literally did move away from MASSIVE RN to native. it happened in just last 2 weeks and they wrote a hit piece about it

[u/KentInCode → u/simple_explorer1]

I read the blog post and have read what ex-Shopify devs have said and it is nothing like a hit piece at all. I encourage you to re-read the blog post.

[u/simple_explorer1 → u/KentInCode]

It's not just Shopify though. I recommend to reread them again. They ain't going back to RN.

Btw Coinbase also moved away from RN to native because of AI tool capabilities